Note: I'm breaking this up into 5 parts because otherwise it gets far too long :(

So after spending a week with OSX, I thought I would see how well I go with setting up Mono on Ubuntu... on Azure.

Turns out it's actually rather simple!

Setting up the Virtual Machine

Setting up the virtual machine is pretty straight forward. From the Azure Portal, click the Virtual Machines tab, and select New.

I create mine from the gallery rather than the quick option.

Select Ubuntu Server 13.04 from the options, give your new server a name. For Authentication I recommend making a password rather than uploading an SSH key. Only because if you're new or trying this out just to play around, that stuff is probably too difficult for now :)

Click next (the little arrow thing) and setup as a Stand-Alone Virtual Machine. Name it and select a region, Next, and bam you're done.

Once the provisioning is complete, you need to click on the Virtual Machine, and select Endpoints.

Create a new endpoint for port 80.

This is so the websites are publicly accessible.

Logging into Ubuntu!

Unlike Windows Server, there's no desktop for us to RDP into, we could add it, but we wont... There's no need to :)

Graph this data and manage this system at https://landscape.canonical.com/

Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud

Use Juju to deploy your cloud instances and workloads:
https://juju.ubuntu.com/#cloud-raring

0 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.

phillip@mono-sample-ph:~$

Next, type in the command sudo -s, and enter your password again.

This will set the current user to a super user so we don't need to call sudo with every command, which can get a little frustrating after a while.

Setup nginx

Before we setup nginx, run the command apt-get update. This downloads all the package lists from the repositories and updates the information with the newest versions of the packages and their dependencies.

Now, run the command apt-get install nginx.

Enter y and hit enter, and it will download the package and install.

Next, run the command service nginx restart, this should say the service is restarting.

If you haven't change the directory then it should be currently empty. So now we can run the command wget http://localhost which will issue a request to the localhost domain and download the HTML file.